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Tuesday, January 2, 2018

SEO for Authors Part2: Keywords and Descriptions

Writers on the Move will be giving some basic tips on using SEO to get more visibility and build authority in your niche . . . and hopefully sell more books. Part 2's topic is keywords and descriptions.

KEYWORDS

If you want to be a savvy book marketer, every thing you do online should have keywords in it. This goes for your webpages and your blog posts.

With that said, you definitely don't want to overdo them.

Keywords are simply words or phrases that people use to search for things online and help search engines to determine what your website and/or post is about. And as an author, you should know the basics for your book marketing journey.

As an example, let's look at the title of this blog post:
SEO for Authors Series: Keywords and Descriptions

This is a heavy keyword title. I didn't do this for search engine optimization in particular, I just wanted to make the article's intent clear to the reader.

Google and the other search engines have come a LONG way. You don't need high-handed antics to get them to know what you're talking about.

But, let's go over the keywords in the title: SEO, authors, keywords, and descriptions.

Since 'descriptions' is kind of a generic term, it really doesn't help searchers. But Google, from the rest of the title and from the article itself, will know that it means in regard to SEO and book marketing. Because of this, they may very well use if for a searcher looking for information on descriptions for search engines.

I wouldn't advise using a lot of keywords in your articles or webpages. This article is full of them because it's the topic and I really couldn't avoid them.

Ordinarily, you only want two or three uses of a particular keyword. In fact, with Google's advancements in their algorithms, they can get the gist of your article without any keywords. That's how advanced it's become.

Other places to use keywords is in the sidebar when you're creating your blog post. You have areas where you can input keywords. This further helps the search engines index and categorize your article. And, it's a quicker way for them to find them.

Here's an picture of the area in Blogger - the Labels section is where your keywords go:

Here's what it looks like in WordPress:

DESCRIPTIONS

Now it's on to descriptions. As you can see in the Blogger picture above, there's a separate area to input a brief description of what your article is about.

Unfortunately, most authors don't take advantage of this feature and it's a mistake.

When Google looks for the answer to a searcher's query, it looks at everything, including titles, keywords, the article itself, the description, and even the optimization of photos. And, if it decides to use your article as the results of a search query, it will use the description along with the link.

If you don't provide a description, Google will, it seems, take the beginning of your blog post.

Now, if your post doesn't jump into a motivating pitch to get the searcher to click on YOUR link, then s/he will click on another results supplied by Google.

On the other hand, if you create an effective description, you'll have a better chance of getting that click back to your website.

Below is the results for a search for 'book marketing.'

This is what the searcher will see when the results of his query comes up. It's the description that will be a determining factor if that searcher clicks on your link.

And in the Blogger picture above, you can see how I filled in the 'search description' area for this blog post.

So, where ever you have the ability to input information to make it easier for the search engines to use your link and people to find and be motivated to click on your link, DO SO.

SOCIAL MEDIA

The same goes for using social media. Make your posts keyword effective and ALWAYS include a description.

Here's an example from Twitter:

It's an effective, motivating description that will encourage searchers or readers to click on your link.

The next article in the series will be on Outbound Links in your blog posts.

4 comments:

Karen this post is fantastic! Thank you! I feel silly (aka dense) that I've never noticed the description box on Blogger or used tags for WP -- Great to have the snap shots. You break down SEO into understandable, usable chunks that we all appreciate much.